A bowl of Japanese ramen drawn as a coloring page: noodles under a halved soft-boiled egg, two sheets of nori standing at the back, strips of menma bamboo shoot, sliced spring onion and a piece of chāshū pork, all in a deep round bowl. Every topping is drawn as its own closed shape, so the sheet works both as a simple color-by-part exercise and as a piece to shade properly. The PDF has two pages — a color sample first, then the plain line art to print and fill in. A small Japanese caption and the site address run along the bottom edge of the picture; they are part of the artwork and cannot be removed. Free to download and print, with no registration.
🗣 Conversation Starters — for care activities and family time
Which ramen broth do you like best — soy sauce, salt, miso or pork bone?
Is there a ramen shop, or one particular bowl, that has stayed in your memory?
Did you eat much instant ramen? Was there a brand you kept going back to?
Which topping would you always want on top?
When did ramen arrive in Japan?
Ramen descends from Chinese wheat noodles served in soup, and the usual account has it reaching Japan through the Chinese quarters of the treaty ports — Yokohama above all — from the Meiji period (1868 onward). Which bowl counts as the first Japanese ramen is argued over: a shop called Rairaiken, opened in Asakusa in 1910, is the one most often named, but rival claims exist and the records are thin. What is not in dispute is the post-war spread, when street stalls made the dish an ordinary meal rather than a Chinese speciality. In 1958 Andō Momofuku of Nissin Foods put the first instant noodles on sale as Chikin Ramen, and the dish left Japan for good.
How many kinds of ramen broth are there?
Shops and guidebooks usually sort ramen into four families — shōyu (soy sauce), shio (salt), miso and tonkotsu (pork bone) — but that is a rough map rather than a fixed system, and a great many bowls blend two of them or sit outside the scheme altogether. The regional styles are the more interesting part: miso in Sapporo, soy sauce in Kitakata, tonkotsu in Hakata, salt in Hakodate. Counting local variations has become a hobby in itself, and the figures people quote run into the hundreds; how many there are depends entirely on how finely you are willing to divide them.
Is instant ramen eaten outside Japan?
Very much so, and on a scale that surprises people. The World Instant Noodles Association put global demand at roughly 121 billion servings in 2022, with China and Hong Kong, Indonesia and India at the top of the table — Japan, where the product was invented, sits well down the list. Nissin’s Cup Noodle, on sale since 1971, is the format most recognisable outside Japan; the company describes it as being sold in more than eighty countries. Instant noodles have also picked up local identities along the way, which is why the packet on a supermarket shelf in Seoul, Lagos or Mexico City tastes nothing like the one in Tokyo.
